State of play

This article was first written in March 2013 and revised three months later for publication on an online editorial website. It was never published, so I am posting it here, now, in light of a recent production of Hedda Gabler in Sydney.

In the past two years in Sydney alone, audiences have been given the opportunity to see numerous classic plays in their intended form or in new ‘updated’ versions by various writers and directors (and writer-directors). Following Simon Stone’s reworking of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, versions of Seneca’s Thyestes, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, Bergman’s film Face to Face, and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof have all been reinterpreted from their original ‘classic’ texts. While these have resulted in many critical and popular successes, I have come to realise that there is a very distinct view or presentation of the world that comes across in a large number of these new versions. Beneath their accomplished surfaces is a more troubling issue – the misrepresentation of women in theatre.

Putuwá: Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Patyegarang

I have written about the story of Patyegarang and William Dawes on this blog before. It’s a beautiful story about language, friendship, trust, heart, and sacrifice; it’s a story about building bridges, whether you realise it or not; how different things might be now had the understanding not been rudely interrupted in 1791. When Bangarra announced their major production for 2014, their twenty-fifth year, was to be based on this story, I added it to my list of must-see productions and eagerly held my breath. And here we are, nine months later; the same amount of time it took those eleven ships to sail from London to Sydney Cove, two-hundred and twenty-seven years ago.

Bangarra’s Patyegarang takes the notebooks William Dawes made of the Sydney language, and turns them into a haunting, elegant and powerfully fluid seventy minutes of dance theatre. If you’re familiar with Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant, then you’re already thinking along the right track of this piece. Except there is a difference: where Grenville’s book is about the friendship from Dawes’ point of view, Bangarra’s Patyegarang is about the young woman, her culture, her land, her language, and her relationship with the white man to whom she taught her language. It is Patyegarang’s story; it is her show.

Into the woods: Siren Theatre Company & Griffin Independent’s The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You

One thing that never ceases to intrigue me about the tiny little Griffin stage is how malleable it is. No two productions ever feel quite the same – it seems bigger or smaller, grander or more intimate, a different shape, as though we’re in a different (larger) theatre entirely; it all depends on any one production’s stagecraft, direction and energy, the way the tiny diamond space is used.

In The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You, presented by Siren Theatre Company with Griffin Independent, the space is filled by Jasmine Christies’ circular curtain set which is drawn and opened as needed, becoming a shadow-screen and a clever framing device, allowing for a playful sense of theatricality and youthful exuberance. Old wooden school chairs, simple items of costume and Hartley T A Kemp’s story-book lighting complete the illusion and the show, an uninterrupted seventy minutes, feels rather like a pop-up book, albeit not quite one for younger children.

The Orchestra and The Big Bang: ACO’s Timeline

Over the past several years, the Australian Chamber Orchestra has played an annual multimedia concert in collaboration with a number of renowned creatives, including photographers Bill Henson (Luminous) and Jon Frank (The Crowd and The Reef). This year, as part of Sydney’s annual Vivid winter festival of lights, music and ideas, the ACO performed Timeline in collaboration with The Presets and, as the concert’s tagline proclaims, life flashed before your very ears. A flick through the concert’s program proves just how mind-bendingly vast and crazy an undertaking it was.

We’ll go down together: Belvoir’s Brothers Wreck

This is not an easy play to write about. Nor should it be. Of all the subjects and issues which can and remain taboo in the contemporary world, it is two essential inviolable truths which remain the most potent and prohibitively awkward to discuss openly, honestly, truthfully: death, and sex. Yet, bizarrely, they are two constants, along with birth, which we all experience during our lives. As Leah Purcell writes in her director’s note, “death is a universal subject and this play will affect anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one, more so for those who have experienced the loss through suicide. And, in particular to this story, youth suicide – this act knows no colour, it touches us all. What this play asks is: how do people deal with death?” How do we talk about death, to each other, to ourselves, as individuals and as a society?

Before a production commences, I always try to read the program notes – not so much in the hope that they’ll explain what I am about to see, but so that like reading the introduction in a book, I am aware of the context or ideas in the piece. The hardest thing about reading Jada Alberts’ writer’s note is just how personal a story this is, how very much a part of her it is, and there is no disguising it nor apology made for the content of Brothers Wreck which unfolds here on Belvoir’s Upstairs stage.

Fish are jumping: STC's Mojo

Written in 1995, Jez Butterworth’s Mojo is often credited with reviving the urban gangster genre, typified in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Now almost twenty years old, the play has lost none of its youthful exuberance and swagger, its rock’n’roll charm and its classic downward spiral of a revenge thriller-tragedy. Presented here by Sydney Theatre Company, Mojo is the story of a group of would-be teddy-boy petty criminals in 1950s London, with the stars of fame, fortune and success firmly in their eyes.

Point of view: THE RABBLE’s Cain and Abel

We are told Cain and Abel is “a show about violence and reinventing history, made by women.” We are told Melbourne theatre-makers THE RABBLE are “a law unto themselves.” We are told their method is “basically to take a big idea, lock themselves in a room, and make a piece of theatre.” We are told many things, but somehow this production, presented at Belvoir’s Downstairs Theatre by Melbourne group THE RABBLE with Belvoir, falls short of being the thrilling visceral and emotional wallop we were expecting (and told to expect).

Don’t judge me: Griffin’s Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography

From the promotional blurb and with a title like Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography, you could perhaps be forgiven for expecting, well, just about anything. Contrary to popular belief, the play has very little to do with the actual physicality of pornography than with the repercussions or perceived stigma that accompanies it (Griffin has issued a disclaimer on their website, apologising for the lack of pornography in the production). True, one character does download eight gigabytes of hardcore pornography, but it is an incidental (albeit crucial) detail in Declan Greene’s bold, uncompromising and fearless play, co-presented here by Griffin and Perth Theatre Company.

If you’ve ever been the Griffin’s Stables theatre, you’ll know there’s nowhere to hide on that tiny diamond stage – for performers, or for the audience. In Greene’s play – as in Lee Lewis’ direction and Matthew Marshall’s lighting, this intimacy and all-seeingness is amplified; the house-lights stay up for most of the seventy-minutes’ running time, and are carefully calibrated to subliminally draw us into moments of unexpected honesty.

Lend me your ear: The Vanguard’s William Shakespeare’s Reservoir Dogs

It has been often said that Shakespeare, with Titus Andronicus, had a Tarantino phase, but did Tarantino have a Shakespeare phase? This production, presented by Russall S. Beattie and playing for four (k)nights at Newtown’s The Vanguard, sets out to test this hypothesis, and the result is nothing short of outrageously enjoyable, sitting somewhere between parody, homage, and an Elizabethan revenge thriller. Written and directed by Steven Hopley, it does not seek to replicate Tarantino’s film on stage (as with Strictly Ballroom The Musical), but instead renders Tarantino’s screenplay into iambic pentameter, featuring many subtle quotations of Shakespeare’s own words, clever assimilations of Elizabethan blank verse, as well as three Elizabethanised pop songs, sung by Key William, the in-house bard.

The story, as in Tarantino’s film, remain intact, so too do the ‘Dogs,’ styled here as bandit knights, perfect strangers to one another, hired to rob a casket of precious jewels from a coach on its way to the King. When their heist is thwarted, it becomes apparent that one of them must be an officer in disguise. The six knights – Sirs Blue, Orange, Brown, Blonde, Pink, and White – are here a motley collection of swaggering fellows, clad in leather doublet jackets, breeches, and boots, wearing daggers at their belts, with temperaments as roguish as their deeds. Along with Lord Joseph, Pleasant-Fellow Edward, Holdaway and an Officer, Hopley expertly adapts Tarantino’s chamber-ensemble into a sweaty and heady concoction of revenge, best served cold.

The gods must be crazy: Furies’ Antigone: The Burial at Thebes

Sophocles’ Theban plays are among the all-time greatest stories in literature, and along with Aeschylus and Euripides, was one of the great dramatists of the Athenian Golden Age. Mythic, epic and created on a grand scale, Sophocles’ plays changed theatrical form as it was then known and became classics of their time and for all time. Presented here by independent company Furies at Darlinghurst’s Tap Gallery’s intimate downstairs theatre, Antigone is, alongside Oedipus the King (or Oedipus Rex as it is more commonly known), perhaps his most well known play. The story of Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter, it tells the struggle of how she strove to give her brother Polyneices the burial he deserved. Defying the order of the king, she faces the consequences of her actions, setting in motion a tragic (albeit preventable) train of events.